Hands-on: MeeGo for netbooks picks up where Moblin left off

The MeeGo project released MeeGo 1. robust.

Intel and Nokia joined forces earlier this year when they combined their mobile Linux operating systems to create MeeGo, an open source platform that is designed to support multiple hardware architectures and a wide range of mobile and embedded device form factors. The project officially launched last month when the source code and initial installable disk images became available.

The MeeGo project took another big step forward this week with the release of MeeGo 1.0 and the launch of the MeeGo Netbook User Experience project, which aims to deliver a MeeGo-based computing environment that is tailored for optimal performance and usability on netbook devices. The Netbook User Experience, which draws heavily from Intel's Moblin project, offers a rich user interface shell that is built with the open source Clutter framework. It is a much-improved version of the Moblin user interface that we explored last year and reviewed on the Dell Mini 10v.

Pragmatic compromises

We conducted extensive testing of the MeeGo 1.0 Netbook User Experience on the same Mini 10v to see how it compares to its Moblin predecessor. The underlying design philosophy is largely unchanged, but a number of significant differences are apparent in the application stack. In the transition from Moblin to MeeGo, Intel seems to have significantly reined in its ambitions by making a number of pragmatic compromises. Several components from Moblin that were built largely from scratch have been discarded in MeeGo in favor of existing Linux software.

A particularly noteworthy example of such an exchange is the Web browser. Moblin 2 had its own custom Web browser that brought together a unique Clutter-based user interface and Mozilla's Gecko HTML rendering engine. It was a very compelling idea because it opened the door to a browsing experience with rich visual affects and more fluid platform integration. Although the concept is intriguing in theory, it was very difficult for Intel to execute on. The custom browser was incomplete and somewhat dysfunctional when we reviewed Moblin last year. Intel has ditched the custom browser and chose to adopt Google Chrome for MeeGo.

Chrome is robust, increasingly mature, and beginning to attract a considerable following. The Ubuntu development community has also embraced Google's browser and recently chose to adopt it as the default for the next major version of the Ubuntu Netbook Edition. Placement in MeeGo, Ubuntu, and Chrome OS could potentially make Chrome the dominant Web browser on the next generation of Linux-based netbooks. It's a good choice for MeeGo, but the downside is that it will never have the kind of seamless integration that was possible with a custom browser.

Another area where compromise is evident is the e-mail client. Moblin's slick Anjal e-mail tool—a specialized front-end of GNOME's Evolution e-mail client—has been discarded in favor of Evolution Express, a new front-end that is more conventional. We praised Anjal in our review of Moblin 2 because it offered a novel approach to improving the e-mail experience on small screens. Evolution Express, by comparison, is little more than an incrementally pared down variation of Evolution's standard desktop user interface.

Although it is less innovative, Evolution Express is more robust and complete. It benefits from the maturity of the existing Evolution code base and is easier to maintain upstream. In a detailed blog entry, Novell's Michael Meeks recently described how Evolution Express was developed and explains the rationale behind the change in direction.

Despite the cuts, there is still a lot of innovation to be found in MeeGo 1.0 for netbooks. The Moblin shell, which is developed with the open source Clutter framework and provides easy access to key functionality of the platform, is still present in MeeGo and has a number of nice improvements. It's now possible to configure the tab order and select which tabs should be shown. MeeGo has also inherited Moblin's brilliant Zones system, an intuitive and self-managing variant of virtual desktops.

MeeGo's Zone management tab

Banshee integration

Novell's excellent Banshee media player has been adopted for inclusion in the MeeGo project and is tightly integrated with the platform. The media tab in the MeeGo shell provides quick access to your Banshee music library and also has built in controls for playback. Clicking the Banshee icon on the media tab will launch a special version of Banshee that has been customized for small screens and conformance with MeeGo's visual style.

MeeGo's media tab, with an integrated Banshee-based player

The Banshee media player running on MeeGo

Banshee is a good choice for MeeGo because it is highly modular, easy to extend with plugins, and has a rich feature set. Banshee developer Aaron Bockover wrote a blog entry this week that discusses Banshee's MeeGo integration and some of the relevant technical details.

During our testing of MeeGo 1.0, we found that any MP3 files that are placed in the Music folder in the user's home directory will automatically be added to Banshee's library, making the music instantly accessible through the MeeGo shell's multimedia tab.

MeeGo has benefited from a lot of upstream improvements that have landed over the past year in several of the included desktop applications. The Empathy instant messaging client, for example, has matured considerably. Empathy is integrated very well in MeeGo, much like it was in Moblin. The People tab displays the user's buddy list, provides easy access to active conversations, and also has a convenient combo box for setting your status. During our tests, we connected it to Facebook Chat and found that it worked well.

The MeeGo chat tab, configured to display Facebook chat contacts

Look and feel

MeeGo's look and feel builds on Moblin's style, but there are some noticeable differences. There are a lot more gradients, which give the widgets a somewhat stronger sense of depth. Bright colors are used for highlighting throughout the user interface. There is a lot of padding everywhere, particularly in the massive window titlebars. The collection of silhouette and tile icons—used in the shell and in applications—is much more complete and consistent.

Moblin really looked great, but there were places where the style was broken, not fully applied, or just inconsistent. A lot of those things have been fixed in MeeGo, giving a more complete view of the designers' aesthetic vision. It looks gorgeous, modern, and distinctive. The general feel of the thing is highly suggestive of an appliance, which is a very positive characteristic for a netbook user interface.

A number of the UI stylings are very well done, but the brightly colored highlights are a bit much in some places, particularly the rainbow icons in the shell tabs. It's worth noting that the style is still a work in progress. Although a number of the little glitches have been fixed, there are still a handful of things that are visibly broken—such as progress bars where the fill leaks out of the border.

The MeeGo shell's Home tab

The MeeGo shell's Devices tab

MeeGo's application browser

A custom version of GNOME's Nautilus file manager that is included in MeeGo

Riddles in the dark

It's really important to understand that the MeeGo 1.0 Netbook builds that are made available by the MeeGo project are not a production-ready Linux distribution. The images include a core MeeGo environment, but are missing a lot of the things that you would need to make practical use of it on conventional netbook hardware. When we tested it on the 10v, we had to plug in an Ethernet cable because it did not support the device's WiFi hardware. It also lacked the proper configuration for the 10v touchpad and the media player was unable to play MP3 files due to lack of codec support.

These kinds of limitations aren't flaws in MeeGo per se; they merely reflect the fact that it's not a full Linux distro. Providing hardware drivers and codecs is left as an exercise for the hardware vendors that will be shipping MeeGo on their devices. Unfortunately, the downside is that regular end users who want to start playing with MeeGo today can't just install it on their personal netbooks with the expectation that it will function properly.

It's possible that a mainstream Linux distributor will fill that gap and offer a build of MeeGo on top of a full, conventional Linux distribution with proper hardware support and all of the other necessary features. Novell is the most likely candidate, because the company has worked very closely with Intel to develop a lot of MeeGo's functionality. The company also used to have an openSUSE Moblin variant nicknamed Goblin. One of the company's designers jokingly proposed the awesome name "Smeegol" (SUSE MeeGo Linux) for a possible openSUSE version of MeeGo, but it's still unclear if such a thing will be released.

Conclusion

Although we're a bit disappointed that the MeeGo netbook environment won't be able to deliver on Moblin's full potential at launch, the compromises make a lot of sense and are necessary in order to ensure that the product functions properly and meets the needs of users. The whole environment is decidedly less ambitious and innovative than Moblin, but the cuts aren't deep enough to undermine the core vision. In that sense, the trade-offs that the developers have made to get MeeGo to market on netbooks are sound. The user experience is good, the software functions well, and the look and feel is excellent.

I have previously called MeeGo a MeeToo product, but this looks like it would be great. I do have a couple of questions though.

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When we tested it on the 10v, we had to plug in an Ethernet cable because it did not support the device's WiFi hardware. It also lacked the proper configuration for the 10v touchpad and the media player was unable to play MP3 files due to lack of codec support.

. Why does an internet device OS not have all the wifi stuff and correct codecs. Closed source or not, if they are behind it they should make a proper user experience. Anyway, I still think it looks great (unlike ubuntu 10.04 =)

It's because it takes years and years to develop a mature and useful operating system and be able to handle details like that.

MeeGo guys should of concentrated on the user interface and put it on a mature and existing Linux system like Ubuntu or even Fedora. They have neither the resources, nor the ability, to make a new Linux OS entirely on their own. It was a waste of their time.

Meego shows promise, but it's going to be worthless for end users without a mature OS to back it up.

Otherwise it may make it into some instant-on environments and maybe some low-end netbooks that Windows 7 can't run on.

Any intention to make this work for touchscreens? I have an Asus t91mt (netbook / convertible tablet) but it runs Windows 7 which is a bit of a joke for touchscreens. More than a bit of a joke, actually ... the iPad well shows the benefits of dropping WIMP-style interactions for touchscreens, but the layout of MeeGo seems like a workable "in-between" for convertible tablets (keeping WIMP but expanding the touch targets, managing tabs rather than windows, etc.).

Edit: oops, answered by own question, the release announcement states:

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Releases are planned on a six month cadence. MeeGo v1.1 will be released in October and it will include support for touch-based devices, such as Handsets, Tablets, and In-Vehicle Infotainment systems.

I have previously called MeeGo a MeeToo product, but this looks like it would be great. I do have a couple of questions though.

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When we tested it on the 10v, we had to plug in an Ethernet cable because it did not support the device's WiFi hardware. It also lacked the proper configuration for the 10v touchpad and the media player was unable to play MP3 files due to lack of codec support.

. Why does an internet device OS not have all the wifi stuff and correct codecs. Closed source or not, if they are behind it they should make a proper user experience. Anyway, I still think it looks great (unlike ubuntu 10.04 =)

the wifi of the dell mini 10 and 10v are broadcom based, not exactly something that plays nice with linux.

I remember Moblin being based on fedora and my WiFi adapter would bomb after about five minutes use. I have been playing with MeeGo this morning on an Acer Aspire One D250 which is fully supported. The UI is beautiful but something about it leaves me feeling disconnected from my netbook, I think it is the whole "Zones" thing that puts me off.

I would have installed it on the HD and run it as a third boot option had the partition manager been less scary. I will keep it on my SD card for now and play with it some more.

It has potential and I will keep looking in on it from time to time. Would be great for a HTPC if you could install something like XBMC or Boxee.

meh, instead of making their own distro they should of just made a DE that rested on the foundation of debian since a)they wouldn't have to worry about making it stable and b) debian's repository has around 34 thousand packages so they will be able to boast that they have a well established "app store". i don't see the point of remaking the wheel when it comes to linux distros.

@atmartens: apparently the Handset UX will be mainly Qt based and it's just the Netbook UX that is using mostly clutter/gtk from Moblin.

@Invid: unfortunately yes, it's rpm based :-(

@saturnblackhole: I installed a couple of regular i386 rpms from elsewhere and they worked okay.

FWIW I manually installed it onto a separate partition on my Toshiba notebook and it works well, nice and snappy. One problem was most apps are not maximised to the full 1360x768 res of my monitor and the wireless did not work until I downloaded and compiled the r8192se_pci from RealTek.

meh, instead of making their own distro they should of just made a DE that rested on the foundation of debian since a)they wouldn't have to worry about making it stable and b) debian's repository has around 34 thousand packages so they will be able to boast that they have a well established "app store". i don't see the point of remaking the wheel when it comes to linux distros.

I would be all over this product. I don't see why I should accept feature / hardware support regressions when all that's needed is a new DE that keeps the new form factors and input methods in mind.

I'm typing this from my Samsung NC10. Just installed Meego 1.0, and, so far, everything works fine out of the box, including wireless and touchpad. FYI. Gonna see how it performs over the next few days.

Why do some of the screens show the rainbow icons and some show a fat grey titlebar?

The rainbow icon bar is like a panel that autohides. It pops down when you move your cursor to the top of the screen. Clicking on one of the tabs in the panel will cause it to show a page that sits on top of whatever windows you have open. In the screenshots with the fat titlebar, what you are seeing is a maximized window with the panel hidden from view.

Ok, first problem - no real word processor. OpenOffice is absent, and the only thing in the "Garage" available is AbiWord, and there's just a button that switches between grayed out "resolving" and clickable "retry." Anyone know of a way to get something other than gedit onto here?

Ok, first problem - no real word processor. OpenOffice is absent, and the only thing in the "Garage" available is AbiWord, and there's just a button that switches between grayed out "resolving" and clickable "retry." Anyone know of a way to get something other than gedit onto here?

Use their version of Suse's build service to create a custom Meego-specific RPM file that you can then install later on.

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Does anyone know if Meego is still adopting RPM as the package format? That's not a deal breaker, but it does significantly reduce the attraction of Meego vs Maemo for me at least.

The actual package format is really really irrelevant here.

The ONLY value in using Deb files over RPM is the fact that Debian puts a huge amount of effort into creating high-quality packages; a fact which Ubuntu successfully exploits (which benefits both Ubuntu and Debian in the long run)

That is to say: It matters much less what the format the packages use then what is actually _inside_ the package.

And since Meego decided to go it alone and built a new Linux version from scratch the answer to the question of what format they use is largely irrelevant. Everything will have to be built specifically for Meego in order for it to work.

I've got MeeGo 1.0 running on my Aspire One, and I have to say that while the colors in various places are overdone, the rainbow on the tabs is a decent touch. I would say that people should "keep an eye to Apple" when using it and contribute improvements.

Personally, I'm really waiting for the Handset release later next month. Get a 2nd SD card, do a dual boot, and see where things are headed.

Ok, first problem - no real word processor. OpenOffice is absent, and the only thing in the "Garage" available is AbiWord, and there's just a button that switches between grayed out "resolving" and clickable "retry." Anyone know of a way to get something other than gedit onto here?

Yeah. I messed with that since last post, and it's decent. Still, prefer to have a locally installed word processor.

....

And then, on a whim, I decided to check the Garage again, and now I can install things. I guess whatever software repositiories MeeGo points to weren't online, or were getting hammered or something. AbiWord works great. I installed Totem, but it doesn't install a shortcut. And, now I can't seem to open a terminal without term crashing. I'll try it again after reboot.

I've got MeeGo 1.0 running on my Aspire One, and I have to say that while the colors in various places are overdone, the rainbow on the tabs is a decent touch. I would say that people should "keep an eye to Apple" when using it and contribute improvements.

Personally, I'm really waiting for the Handset release later next month. Get a 2nd SD card, do a dual boot, and see where things are headed.

Also, what's up with the image on the MeeGo articles?

I think it's the perfect touch-up of the old Meebo. Old one looked cool, unique, but a tad too toyish at certain points. I think the new polish is just right to keep it light-hearted, yet not immature.

It's also getting a little old that these distros don't come with a shutdown menu option from day 1, or at least show one when you press the power button. Term keeps crashing, so only way to reboot is shutdown. Power options in MeeGo need to at least be brought up to speed with other distros. At least the default for closing the lid is competent (standby).

Well, be warned. I dunno if it's a problem with the Garage (MeeGo take on Ubuntu Software Center), or with AbiWord or Totem specifically, but I can no longer launch a term. I uninstalled both of them, and Term still crashes every time I try to launch it.

Qt is the official SDK for MeeGo. Qt 4.6 is included by default in the netbook version, though it isn't used by any of the core applications or the user interface shell yet.

...which is sort of weird, but I guess if they can make the two (Qt and Clutter/GTK) consistent enough that it's invisible to users, then more power to them.

Qt has a nice theme engine called QGtkStyle that makes Qt applications running on GNOME look indistinguishable from Gtk+ applications. I haven't tested it on MeeGo yet, but it works very well on Ubuntu.

Qt has a nice theme engine called QGtkStyle that makes Qt applications running on GNOME look indistinguishable from Gtk+ applications. I haven't tested it on MeeGo yet, but it works very well on Ubuntu.

It's a shame that this doesn't work better going the other way around. I'm crossing my fingers that GTK 3 will have the themeing capabilities to make it handle the gtk-qt engine better....

O damn. I thought meego would be built on an existing distro but with a new UI to match smaller devices and some optimalizations to conserve power. I'm personally a debian man so I'm rather used to having the entire world at my fingertips, I thought this would be more of the same, but with the fedora repo's (which I assumed are up to par or not far off the debian repo's).

The fact that they choose chrome over firefox would not have been bad if i could just do the equivalent of "apt-get install firefox". Dito for banshee and amarok (why not amarok in a QT environment btw?).

Though the GUI may be nice, I fail to see the benefit of reinventing the wheel and I may need to rethink my decision to wait for the first meego devices to come out and instead head for android. I think they lost the edge they could've gained over android by starting from scratch.

Qt has a nice theme engine called QGtkStyle that makes Qt applications running on GNOME look indistinguishable from Gtk+ applications. I haven't tested it on MeeGo yet, but it works very well on Ubuntu.

That's one thing, but I was thinking more about interaction issues. Or are they going to write GNOME HIG-ish apps using Qt? I guess there's nothing preventing it.

The fact that they choose chrome over firefox would not have been bad if i could just do the equivalent of "apt-get install firefox". Dito for banshee and amarok (why not amarok in a QT environment btw?).

try this: sudo yum install firefox

I've had an Aspire One about a year and a half, and I've used both the original Linpus distribution (dreadful) and Kuki, which is similar to Ubuntu netbook remix but optimized for the Aspire One. (in theory)

I installed Meego last night (I had bashed something accidentally and had to re-install anyway) and have been pretty impressed with it. Nice fast booting, and a good interface for small screens, although I'd like to shrink that bar at the top of the screen. Everything works out of the box.

A lot of the tools I need for my everyday work are in the standard repositories - emacs, latex, gimp, inkscape, subversion - but some others are missing like OpenOffice, octave, and gnuplot. And the default Evolution email is really annoying, and spends most of its time displaying "downloading message <n>".

Thanks for the link; what is really needed is to get power consumption below 10watts. For me I don't care too much about the performance such as uncompressing a kernel, how fast something compiles etc. because quite frankly it isn't something I'd do on a netbook in the first place. My main concern when it comes to a netbook is battery life - I want to squeeze every last drop of battery life out of the device. If it means that I can't play 1080HD videos then so be it - as long as I can surf the net, write some small documents, post on my blog and able to hook up to my mobile providers 3G broadband network then I'm all good.

It's a great step in the right direction, and well beyond Moblin. Once reliability improves, pretty sure it'll be a keeper. Certain things, like web browsing, are rock solid, but then once I installed two apps from the Garage, I can't use Term. And AbiWord is completely unusable, and I need a locally installed Word Processor. If it were more stable, and I could easily continue where I left off on the docs I already created in OO, I'd use it over UNE. UNE's UI is great, but I think MeeGo's is better. The whole system is also snappier. Boot time is maybe a few seconds shorter, but it comes back from standby instantly, which is also a tad better than UNE. With all the support they have, it probably won't take too long to mature a bit. They could also use a better collection of software to choose from. UNE has them beat in that department bigtime. Still, a great start, and, hopefully, a sign of great things coming.

MeeGo really is not ready yet. a lot of bugs, and so much stuff I don't get.What is the advantage to "zones" to just normal windows in a standard linux distro for example?Also the driver support isn't there. Wifi drivers for example are often missing even on "supported hardware". You can get them to work easily enough though: http://slaine.org/_slaine/Meego_1.0_Wifi.htmlThere is no read/write support for NTFS drives, most of the important codecs for audio and video playback are missing, the repository for applications is very small, and the support forum is still in its infancy.It does boot up pretty fast, but the overall speed in applications isn't very different to Ubuntu 10.4 or Linux Mint 9 (MUCH more mature distributions).

This is not what I would call "polished" at all. On MeeGo 1.0 you get the impression that more time has been spend developing the system than the total time using the OS. It is a toy for developers, not suitable for end-users at all at the moment IMHO.This MeeGo 1.0 release should have been a beta, not an actual release.

I have to say I am a bit surprised that (as far as I can read from the article anyway) no KDE applications have been used in the core, even though the MeeGo platform is supposed to be based on Qt? Any thoughts on this?

Anyway, happy to see this project moving forward, excited about what is to come!

Presumably it won't be too hard to port these improvements into packages in Ubuntu or Fedora or other distros. For the hardcore they could make a "spin" that defaults to using these packages, (rather than just picking a desktop after installing the ordinary distro). Why anyone would want to reinstall their entire OS just to get a few UI improvements makes no sense to me.

I have to say I am a bit surprised that (as far as I can read from the article anyway) no KDE applications have been used in the core, even though the MeeGo platform is supposed to be based on Qt? Any thoughts on this?

Anyway, happy to see this project moving forward, excited about what is to come!

best guess, what we are seeing right now is basically moblin with meego themed artwork. Intel probably wants something that can be pushed to netbook companies asap. Especially as asus is making noise about bundling intel's appup center on future netbooks, and maybe even launching some with meego.

Nokia will probably be the first to show a Qt based meego, running on top of ARM with a interface more suited to pocket devices then netbooks.